Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Mariola Espinosa, assistant professor of the history of medicine at Yale University, has been selected as the ninth annual Sherman Emerging Scholar by the Department of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. With expertise in the areas of infectious disease and Caribbean history, Espinosa combines public health policy and geopolitics in this year's lecture to highlight the role concerns about epidemics and the spread of disease have played in the development of imperialism and American foreign and domestic policies.

Espinosa will discuss "Contagion and Conquest: The United States and the Fight Against Disease in the Caribbean" at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 21 in UNC Wilmington's Burney Center. Free and open to the public, the lecture will be followed by a reception with Espinosa.

The Virginia and Derrick Sherman Emerging Scholar award is given each year to a young scholar in the social sciences or humanities who "we believe will become influential in his or her field," said Taylor Fain, chair of the Sherman committee and UNCW associate professor of history. "Espinosa stood apart from other nominees this year. In her young career, she has already established herself as an accomplished historian of Latin America, medicine and public health policy, as well as U.S. relations with the nations of the Caribbean."

The perception of foreign threats to public health, the development of policies to counter them and the consequences for people around the world are, Espinosa contends, critical and often overlooked dimensions of history. Her lecture will explore the relationships between empire builders and their subjects with the Cuban example in mind, and some of the implications of that history for contemporary international public health efforts in the developing world.

Espinosa earned her Ph.D. from UNC Chapel Hill in 2003 and her B.A. from Princeton in 1996. She has published various articles and book chapters on public health in the 19th century in South America. She received critical acclaim for her research on yellow fever in Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, published in 2009, which won the Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award from the Association for the History of Medicine.

Media contact:
Dana Fischetti, media relations manager, 910.508-3127 or fischettid@uncw.edu